Just as I am reading and prepping the story below to post, I see this highly disturbing video from the Dallas Morning News. They accurately report it like this:

"A police report says that Officer Cardan Spencer
fired on Bobby Gerald Bennett, 52, after Bennett walked toward him and
his partner with a “knife raised in an aggressive manner.”

But
a neighbor’s video surveillance camera recording shows something
different: It shows Bennett, who was seated in a chair, initially
rolling back from officers as they advance on him. Bennett then stands
up but does not move. His hands remain at his side and he is standing
still when Spencer shoots him, firing his service weapon four times."

RutherfordHere’s a recipe for disaster: Take a young man (or woman), raise him on
a diet of violence, hype him up on the power of the gun in his holster
and the superiority of his uniform, render him woefully ignorant of how
to handle a situation without resorting to violence, train him well in
military tactics but allow him to be illiterate about the Constitution,
and never stress to him that he is to be a peacemaker and a peacekeeper,
respectful of and subservient to the taxpayers, who are in fact his
masters and employers.
Once you have fully indoctrinated this young man (or woman) on the idea
that the police belong to a brotherhood of sorts, with its own honor
code and rule of law, then place this person in situations where he will
encounter individuals who knowingly or unknowingly challenge his
authority, where he may, justifiably or not, feel threatened, and where
he will have to decide between firing a weapon or, the more difficult
option, adequately investigating a situation in order to better assess
the danger and risk posed to himself and others, and then act on it by
defusing the tension or de-escalating the violence.
I’m not talking about a situation so obviously fraught with risk that
there is no other option but to shoot, although I am hard pressed to
consider what that might be outside of the sensationalized Hollywood
hostage crisis scenario. I’m talking about the run-of-the mill
encounters between police and citizens that occur daily. In an age when
police are increasingly militarized, weaponized and protected by the
courts, these once-routine encounters are now inherently dangerous for
any civilian unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I’m not the only one concerned, either. Indeed, I’ve been contacted by
many older cops equally alarmed by the attitudes and behaviors of
younger police today, the foot soldiers in the emerging police state.
Yet as I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,
this is what happens when you go from a representative democracy in
which all members are subject to the rule of law to a hierarchical one
in which there is one set of laws for the rulers and another, far more
stringent set, for the ruled.
Hence, it is no longer unusual to hear about an incident in which
police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. This is
becoming all too common. For example, on September 14th
alone, there were two separate police shootings of unarmed individuals,
resulting in death and/or injury to innocent individuals—and those are
just the shootings that happened to make national headlines.
The first shooting incident took place in Charlotte, N.C., when three
police officers responded to a 911 “breaking and entering” call in which
a homeowner reported that a man she didn’t know or recognize had been
knocking at her door repeatedly. Upon arriving on scene, the police saw a
man matching the caller’s description running towards them. One officer
fired a stun gun, after which the second officer opened fire on the
unarmed 24-year-old, who died on the scene. Only afterwards did police
realize the dead man, a former football player, had been in a car
accident and was likely approaching them for help.
Later that same day, in New York’s Times Square, police officers shot
into a crowd of tourists, aiming for a 35-year-old man who had been
reportedly weaving among cars and loosely gesturing with his hands in
his pockets. The cops missed the man, who was unarmed, and shot a
54-year-old woman in the knee and another woman in the buttock. The man
was eventually subdued with a Taser.
Just a few weeks earlier, in Florida, 60-year-old Roy Middleton was
shot in the leg by police when he wandered out to his Lincoln Town car,
which was parked in his mother’s driveway, in search of cigarettes in
the wee hours of the morning. A neighbor, seeing Middleton, reported him
to 911 as a possible robber. Police, after ordering the unarmed black
man out of the car, began firing on Middleton, who likened the
experience to a “firing squad. Bullets were flying everywhere.” The car
was reportedly riddled with bullets and 17 shell casings were on scene.
Defending their actions, the two police officers claim that Middleton,
who had a metallic object in his hand, “made a lunging motion” out of
the car causing them to “fear for their safety.” That metallic object
was a key chain with a flashlight attached.
These are not isolated incidents. Law enforcement officials are
increasingly responding to unsubstantiated fears for their safety and
perceived challenges to their “authority” by drawing and using their
weapons.
For example, Miami-Dade police slammed a 14-year-old boy to the ground,
putting him in a chokehold and handcuffing him after he allegedly gave
them “dehumanizing stares” and walked away from them, which the officers
found unacceptable. According to Miami-Dade Police Detective Alvaro
Zabaleta, “His body language was that he was stiffening up and pulling
away… When you have somebody resistant to them and pulling away and
somebody clenching their fists and flailing their arms, that’s a threat.
Of course we have to neutralize the threat.”
Unfortunately, this mindset that any challenge to police authority is a
threat that needs to be “neutralized” is a dangerous one that is part
of a greater nationwide trend that sets law enforcement officers beyond
the reach of the Fourth Amendment. Equally problematic is the trend in
the courts that acquits officers involved in such shootings, letting
them off with barely a slap to the wrists.

This begs the question: what exactly are we teaching these young
officers in the police academy when the slightest thing, whether it be a
hand in a pocket, a man running towards them, a flashlight on a
keychain, or a dehumanizing stare can ignite a strong enough “fear for
their safety” to justify doing whatever is deemed necessary to
neutralize the threat, even if it means firing on an unarmed person?
The problem, notes Jerome Skolnick and former New York City police
officer/Temple University criminal justice professor James Fyfe in their
book Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force, is that

police work is often viewed by those in the force as an us-versus-them
war rather than a chance for community-oriented engagement and problem
solving. The authors also point to a lack of accountability as one of
the reasons why police violence persists. They acknowledge that, yes,
police officers are placed in dangerous situations that at times require
immediate responses. But they maintain that that doesn’t excuse using
more force than is needed to subdue someone, the lack of professional
training that leads to such fear-based responses, or treating citizens
as enemy combatants.

As Titania Kumeh reports in Mother Jones, this has been coming
on for a long time. Remember back in 1999, when four plainclothes New
York police officers shot and killed a 22-year-old unarmed immigrant who
was standing in the doorway of his apartment? The cops thought the
young man was reaching for his gun—it turned out to be his wallet—and
fired 41 shots at him, landing 19 on his body. The cops were acquitted
of all charges.
In 2003, an unarmed man, kneeling before four Las Vegas police
officers, was shot with an assault rifle because one of the officers
“feared” the unarmed man was feigning surrender and about to grab a gun.
A jury ruled the shooting excusable.
In 2006, plainclothes police officers, again in New York, fired 50
shots into a car after it reportedly rammed into their unmarked van,
killing the 23-year-old driver who had just left his bachelor party and
wounding his two friends. Police claimed they had been following the
men, suspecting one of them had a gun. Again, the cops were cleared of
all charges.
In 2010, in California, police shot and killed a young man who had
allegedly committed some sort of traffic violation while riding his
bicycle. After an altercation in which the young man resisted police and
fled to his mother’s house, police officers pursued him, kicked down
his mother’s door and opened fire.
That same year, in Long Beach, California, police responded with heavy
firepower to a perceived threat by a man holding a water hose. The
35-year-old man had reportedly been watering his neighbor’s lawn when
police, interpreting his “grip” on the water hose to be consistent with
that of someone discharging a firearm, opened fire. The father of two
was pronounced dead at the scene.
Skip ahead to 2013 and you have the 16-year-old teenager who skipped
school only to be shot by police after they mistook him for a fleeing
burglar. Not to mention the July 26 shooting of an unarmed black man in
Austin “who was pursued and shot in the back of the neck by Austin
Police… after failing to properly identify himself and leaving the scene
of an unrelated incident.” And don’t forget the 19-year-old Seattle
woman who was accidentally shot in the leg by police after she refused
to show her hands.
Make no mistake, whereas these shootings of unarmed individuals by what Slate
terms “trigger happy” cops used to take place primarily in big cities,
that militarized, urban warfare mindset among police has spread to
small-town America. No longer is this just a problem for immigrants, or
people of color, or lower income communities, or young people who look
like hooligans, out for trouble. We’re all in this together, black and
white, rich and poor, urban and suburban, guilty and innocent alike.
We’re all viewed the same by the powers that be: as potential
lawbreakers to be viewed with suspicion and treated like criminals.
Whether you’re talking about police shootings of unarmed individuals,
NSA surveillance, drones taking to the skies domestically, SWAT team
raids, or roadside strip searches, they’re all part of a totalitarian
continuum, mile markers on this common road we’re traveling towards the
police state. The sign before us reads “Danger Ahead.” What remains to
be seen is whether we can put the brakes on and safely reverse direction
before it’s too late to turn back.